Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics

• Personalized medicine infrastructure developmentIntegration of longitudinal, multi-modal biomedical data on clinical and molecular scales to develop statistical methods and predictive models of disease outcomes. My three major areas of focus are omics, electronic medical records, and wearable devices.

• Molecular biology and bioinformatics "wet and dry" lab research on cardiovascular epigenomics• Performed genome-wide analyses of gene expression and DNA methylation in cardiovascular disease using microarray and next generation sequencing. Further analysis done using standard laboratory techniques including qPCR, blotting, bisulfite sequencing, immunohistochemistry, etc. on in vivo (mouse) and in vitro (cultured endothelial cells) models.• Thesis work culminated in a May 2014 publication in the Journal of Clinical Investigation detailing a novel epigenetic pathway in cardiovascular disease.

• Bioinformatics and specialized, automated next generation sequencing (NGS) sample process development, Metagenomics project, Office of Infectious Diseases, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Bioterrorism Rapid Response and Advanced Technology Lab• Contributor to NGS whitepapers and Task Order Proposals addressing bioinformatics needs in various divisions at the CDC

• Studied major causes of vascular stiffness in aging, and exposed a new potential therapeutic target for hypertension. • Arginase 1 (Arg1) Project: Arg1 hyperactivity causes high blood pressure , and we determined that interference with the Arg1-NOS2 interaction reduced active Arg1, indicating its potential importance as a therapeutic target. (Mol Cel Biochem. 2011)• Transglutaminase (TG2) Project: We demonstrated that loss of s-nitrosylation due to aging increases TG2 activity and leads to vascular wall stiffness. (Circ Res. 2012)

• Discovered crucial locations of DNA damage that hinder vascular cell respiration and cause cell death. Specifically, we used lentiviral knockdown of mitochondrial DNA maintenance genes located in endothelial cell genomic DNA to determine the effect on endothelial mitochondria.

• Designed a rapid, cost-effective protein activity screen to discover the most effective Arginase 1 inhibitor to treat hypertension. I used this novel technique to quickly and accurately screen compounds, improving the efficiency of the inhibitor design process and enabling discovery of the most effective Arg1 inhibitor.